In spite of rapid increases in computational power over the past few years, we still use keyboards and mice to interact with our computers. With the advent of tablet PCs and advances in handwriting recognition (Newton, we hardly knew ye), we now can combine computerization with something that to us feels more “natural.” Writing with a stylus on a touch-sensitive screen is analgous enough to writing with a pen on paper. Styli and touchpads have certainly allowed artists to enter the world of digital art without having to learn how to draw with a mouse, which is a lot like trying to draw with a bar of soap.
Soon we will have a variety of excellent and highly useful flexible displays to use, as well as digital paper and pens. By the year 2020, it is believed that the Conversational User Interface (CUI) will be commonplace. CUIs are already here to some degree; you may already have noticed the increase in the number and quality of voice-response systems used by some services over the last few years. I remember how impressed I was the first time I encountered one that worked well.
Interacting with computers and the internet by speaking with avatar-like software agents that operate on our behalf will be the next great leap in how we work with computational and communications technology. The more time passes, the more distributed and decentralized systems will become. We have progressed from mainframes to PCs to wirelessly networked devices in a very short time.
I think that what we’re going to have in the future is a situation where that decentralization continues to the point where the computational power itself will not reside inside any device or appliance at all. Not only will there not be computers as we now know them sitting on desks or being lugged around in laptop cases, there will not even be computers in our pockets anymore. Computational power will be available as a service, just like electricity or water. Our touchpoints with this computational power will be input and output systems only. It will be the ultimate client/server model.
So what might these input-output systems look like? It is difficult to resist thinking along the same familiar lines of today’s input-output devices. There is, in fact, no reason to assume that we will employ this tera- or petaflop-level computing power by anything we would now think of as a device. Moving past the CUI altogether, we enter into the NUI: the Neurological User Interface.
Granted, the technology in 2030 may exist to turn nearly any surface into a user interface by using nanotechnology to create smart surfaces capable of becoming anything from a page of text to the climate control unit of a room. But there may not be a need for it. Why would there be, when, by moving the input-output equipment to the inside of the body, we can access computational power by thought alone? Even now, in our present time, we can already create systems that respond to user thoughts.
I believe that the Singularity will occur (update: not so sure, anymore), but I also believe that until it finally does, people will want to remain as human as possible. They will not want to become frightening cyborgs nor will they want to be rid of their bodies and become pure machines. By creating tiny implants that interface with our neurological systems, information wirelessly delivered to us by computers and the net will by overlaid onto what we are really seeing and hearing.
In terms we can understand in the present day, imagine not needing a physical computer monitor because anything you wish to see from the web would be fed directly to your optic nerve as if you were seeing a physical object. The auditory compenent of that information could be fed to your auditory nervous system so that you would hear voices or music or sounds as though the soundwaves were physically reaching your eardrum and being translated into the nerve signals your brain interprets as sound. The visual information could be presented in any form you choose: text floating in the air, an avatar speaking to you, a “television” you could watch and listen to. Commands could be subvocalized or selected from floating “buttons” in the air (an idea we’re now starting to see more and more in science fiction movies).
The richness of the NUI and the computational power available to a person would be based on how much a person could pay, much like today’s DSL is more expensive than dial-up access, and HD televisions are more expensive than regular ones.
In part 2, I’ll bring up some of the new problems that will arise from this, such as reality hacking.
Technorati Tags: singularity, future, ui, user interface, computers, technology
